It's not just "unfair" competition. Intel just performs better. Ever since the old days of the pentium 4, where it sure looked like AMD is about to overtake Intel, Intel switched to Core, Core2, and the rest is history. AMD failed to be that close ever since.

Interesting Comments by Arun!
What this illusion about ARM or X86 based Embedded market? In case of ARM all there Licensee have built Embedded most parts, so every conceivable permutation of ARM embedded is out there, even with FPGA & PLD. If you do not like the peripheral selection of fixed function products. So now left with x86 in Embedded again. This market has been around since early 90's, AMD and Intel had parts here since then as well. i.e. Comms Infra, Casino Gaming, Industrial these markets have been there for long time, they are dominated by ARM Licensee starting from high end in Comms (Cavium, Broadcom, Freescale, ) , Industrial ( all MCU vendors Atmel, Microchip, ST Micro, and More) Casino gaming seems to be the market left out there for AMD. IOT is once again all existing ARM Licensee starting with TI, Qualcomm, Broadcom, ........to any MCU vendor. But it good make people drink Koolaid!

The difference will be that this time it will be a fair competition and the best device will win.
The challenge in competing with Intel and being the only other competitor was that Intel would use its large volumes as leverage to keep AMD to mimimal volumes at the OEMs. The OEMs had no choice but to toe the line.
Isn't competition a novel concept.